10 Questions with the people behind YayTrail

Two Irish brothers Peter and Tom Kehoe are the people behind a new Irish technology startup, YayTrail. Below is an excerpt of some of the more popular questions that have been recently asked of them.


Why did you start YayTrail? What made you think about doing this?

Peter & Tom: For years now we’ve been exploring the idea of publishing on the web. It's been pretty amazing watching how the Internet is turning more and more people into active contributors of media. We think it's still more difficult than it should be to get involved, though. It's not as easy as it could be for a lot of people to just chip in and shape the media round them, and to share their voice with likeminded friends and beyond.


For most people still, the web is quite a passive experience. They browse to a site, read an article, click through to another article, rinse and repeat. The means for users to express themselves here are quite limited - if they want to share a point of view they'll create yet another user account that they'll likely promptly forget about, and add their say to a sea of strangers' comments tucked away somewhere relatively few people look. It's a lot of hassle for a net result that is of relatively limited value. There's a lot of hoops to jump through on each site before you actually get to have your say - and you're usually told to go into the corner to say it. A smaller number still are motivated to create their own space on the web outside of other website - like a blog or a Twitter feed. A large number of those end up abandoning their efforts as producers of content however. Put into their own context it seems a lot of people tend to draw a blank.

We got to thinking there was an opportunity to use the increasing power and flexibility of browsers to enable many more people to have their say, with a simple platform for content creation and sharing that's built across all webpages, and that connects groups of friends and peers directly rather than through the webpages themselves. We figured it should be as easy and spontaneous as just clicking and typing, as if the page were, for example, a word document. With no password walls to climb over on different sites, and with an easy means to find friends' content - with easy means for your content and your friends' content to stand out from that 'sea of strangers'. We wanted to do this without any "bad bits" like large sidebars and obstructive content layers hovering over webpages and so on. After some tinkering we realised that browser technology today allows us to do all this, so we figured, why not?


What makes this different compared to existing browser plugins? Who are your competitors?

Tom: We believe that our product is the first of its kind, as a cross-website content creation tool that is truly in-line.


What do you mean by 'in-line'?

Peter: By this we mean content that is actually part of the page. Consider typing into a word document - when you add content to a document there you are adding it inline. Existing content in the document moves around, if necessary, to accomodate the new content. When you write an email, as you edit the body of the email, you're also editing it in-line. But if for example you attach a document to the email, that document's content isn't in-line with the email - it lives outside of the email body itself.

We've had cross-website content creation tools that live in web browsers before - like Diigo, Google Sidewiki more recently, and more. But to date these kinds of tools have confined the user's content to large sidebars in the user's browser or to layers living on top of the original webpage - in the latter case, layers that often obscure the original webpage's content. From the user's perspective, the content isn't actually a part of the page. If you like, the content has been 'attached' to the page like an email attachment via sidebars and extra content layers.

YayTrail allows the user's content to exist as a first class element of the page - as something that lives in the page itself, in the structure and flow of the original webpage, right alongside the original page content. It elevates the status of the user's content to a level second to none. The user effectively has the same status as the original creator of the page.

This has a lot of desirable side-effects for the user experience - unlike our competitors we don't need big sidebars taking up space in your browser, we don't need to put content on a layer on top of the page. Our interface is simply a blinking cursor on the page, the same simple interface that people are used to with regular word processing programs. We believe that by removing the heavier visual elements and complexities associated with our competitors such as sidebars and extra content layers we can lower barriers and appeal to a much broader audience of users. The typical audience for services like Diigo has been researchers and techie folks, which we think is a consequence of the type of trade off and complication of the user interface that's required by these services. Remove that tradeoff and I think we can reach new types of user, and faciliate more casual and spontaneous usage.


When you use YayTrail on a page are you actually changing the original webpage?

Tom: No, it is important to understand that using YayTrail enables the user to change their "view" of the webpage and allow others that use YayTrail to see this view. The actual webpage on the server remains unchanged and people who are not using YayTrail and who are not subscribed to you on YayTrail will not see your changes. Using an analogy, you could think of it as putting on a pair of glasses that changes your view of the webpage – that is, it's a view that is individual to you. These changes are made on your end, inside your web browser. The idea of your view of the web being a personal one is something that probably doesn't seem familiar to many people. We're used to the notion of the web being an entirely shared, universally consistent thing. But I think you'll see a growing trend of the personalisation of the web - YayTrail is one such tool which allows you to personalise your web with your friends.


Can you mute people? How do you stop people spamming webpages with unwanted content?

Tom: YayTrail uses a model where users subscribe to “follow” other users. Until you have subscribed to YayTrail to follow a user you will not see their changes to any webpages. You can at any time unsubscribe from another user to stop seeing their changes, therefore you will not see spam unless you subscribe to follow a user that sends spam. The YayTrail model offers you total control over whose content you see and whose content you do not wish to see. So you can follow your friends and other people of interest and forget the rest.


How will you make money?

Tom: YayTrail is free to register for all users. Being a commercial entity is one of our core principles and our goal and responsibility is to operate YayTrail in a manner that is both sustainable and profitable. In this early stage we are evaluating many possible revenue opportunities including specialist account types for commercial enterprises that are interested in marketing and branded messaging, direct advertising, and licensing product models.


What are the benefits and disadvantages of giving the user this level of control?

Peter: YayTrail gives the user a large degree of control and quite a lot of power in how and where they can express themselves. As we said before, with YayTrail the user is now virtually on the same level as a page's original creator. This type of control can obviously be abused. For example, a user may make an inappropriate contribution in the context of a page with a serious subject matter or may use it to try and spread inaccurate information. On the other hand, we think this level of control gives most users a positive power to express themselves and communicate in the context of the media around them in a simple and fairly unprecedented way.

We strongly believe that once you offer the web user more control they will use it - the corner cases of people abusing that control shouldn't prevent the user in general from enjoying that kind of freedom. The Internet is all about giving the user control; YayTrail gives users power to both to create with unprecedented levels of control, and to filter that content which they see so they can kick out undesirable elements from their sphere of influence. The Internet has disrupted so many fields through handing ever more control to the user - this approach has always won out. We think, in a way, it's about time the web disrupted itself in regards to how users can create and share content on the web, and in the status and prominence given to that content. For a long time many have viewed the web as a network of webpages, and the people behind those webpages. We believe this ignores the potential role of the browsers connecting to these webpages, and the people behind those browsers - i.e. the vast majority of particpants on the web. Our vision of the web is for the user and the browser to be as important on the web as that user’s peers wish it to be. As browser technology has evolved, it is now possible to make this happen.


What’s the difference between YayTrail and blogging?

Peter: This is probably a case of semantics. Blogging as a term is really a fairly abstract concept, from which we've seen an evolving range of manifestations - the original 'blog' as popularised by Blogger and others, microblogging as per Twitter and so on. The type of content creation YayTrail enables could be considered as under the umbrella term of blogging - perhaps it can be considered as in-context or 'in-page' blogging.


What type of feedback have you been getting so far?

Tom: YayTrail is still in a preview phase so lots of things still need to mature and we've many, many ideas and improvements that we've yet to implement, but user feedback to date has been excellent. We’ve learned a lot about the need to simplify our approach – this concept is a new one to most users and so it’s interesting to experiment with the various ways to enable users to better understand the concept. We’ve started recently soliciting feedback within media and industry circles and we’re seeing quite a bit of excitement and intrigue about the project.


Why the name, YayTrail?

Peter: I'd been reading a book, "What Would Google Do?" by Jeff Jarvis, and the author said something along the lines of brands and people now 'being' the trail of content they leave behind them on the web. The idea that 'you' are increasingly represented by the trail of content and interactions you create on the web. That struck a chord, we thought this related closely to what we were doing - allowing people an easy way to create little nuggets of content across the web - so we decided to contract the notion of 'you are your trail' to 'YayTrail'. It rhymes in a certain way, it's reasonably short, so we think it'll do...

Posted by Peter at 4:31 AM